deleting from tarfile

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Mark McEahern wrote:
> It doesn't appear so.  A workaround, of course, is to create a new file 
> with the subset of files from the old file:

That is actually the *only* way to do that. tarfiles cannot be "sparse",
in the sense that parts of the file can be marked as deleted. So in
order to delete a file, you have to copy the entire tarfile, and skip
the file you want to delete - whether you do this yourself, or whether
tarfile.py does it for you.

Regards,
Martin